Measuring What Matters - This report hails testing and accountability as fundamental to improving student learning. The result of more than a year of research, the report calls tests that are valid, reliable and fair the best means of charting the country’s progress toward the goal of improved academic achievement. It applauds the efforts under way in virtually every state to specify academic standards and measure student learning. The report, however, offers a word of caution: tests are a means, not an end, to school reform. More work must be done to ensure that tests are good measures of learning. (Committee for Economic Development, December 2000)...